Abstract

Rigorous analytical solutions for electromagnetic fields in the presence of layered media having nonlinearities of the Kerr type have been developed for guided surface waves¹ and for incident homogeneous plane waves.² In both cases, ideally lossless configurations have been assumed, i.e., all dielectric constants are real and the pertinent wavenumbers are either pure real or pure imaginary. However, work on guided leaky waves (having wavenumbers that are complex even in ideally lossless structures) has been limited to the case where the nonlinear region is semi-infinite.³ We therefore report here a general procedure for deriving leaky-wave fields supported by Kerr-type nonlinear layers of bounded thickness. These fields can be regarded as a new class of solutions, which serve as the nonlinear counterpart of leaky-wave modes along linear configurations. Although we derive leaky waves guided by a single nonlinear layer, our procedure can be readily generalized to any number of such layers, including semi-infinite ones, and possibly to nonlinearities other than the Kerr type.

© 1989 Optical Society of America